SAP Trying to Jam Dreamforce 2013’s Social Noise

Given that SAP’s foe salesforce.com has been very vocal about its Salesforce Chatter enterprise social network (ESN) offering, SAP might have decided to somewhat spoil the Dreamforce 2013 mega-conference buzz by announcing the success of its SAP Jam social software platform for businesses. A year ago, SAP launched the SAP Jam ESN platform and social business processes (by combining the best features of former SuccessFactors Jambok and SAP StreamWork offerings), and some of the world’s leading businesses have gotten on board.

Companies such as Marriott International, Kaeser Kompressoren, and TELUS Communications, Inc. are using SAP Jam to help drive business results. With more than 10 million subscribers, SAP claims to be the leading enterprise collaboration solution and the only social platform that enables companies to collaborate across the entire business process, where and when people need it—in their applications, on mobile devices, or directly in SAP Jam. Jive Software, Salesforce Chatter, or Microsoft Yammer might dispute the user figures (i.e., are we talking about true active users or just licensed users that are not really using the product?) and the leadership, but the point here by all is that enterprises are increasingly embracing social tools to reduce pesky email traffic, engage employees and partners, improve processes, etc.

Work Patterns—Social BPM?

Unless workplace social collaboration is connected to a larger-scale business process, it is little more than a nice idea. To that end, along its social evolution path (Figure 1 - click for larger image) SAP recently introduced work patterns, pre-built collaborative processes that give companies a 360-degree view into critical workplace activities by combining expertise, content, problem solving, and templates with applications and real-time data from business systems.

The first pre-built patterns were made generally available on November 14 and bring together SAP Jam with data and objects from SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) to support account planning, opportunity management, deal rooms, and service requests for sales and service professionals (see an example in Figure 2). Other SAP lines of business suites and modules will follow suit, e.g. service requests, collaborative product design, forecasting and budgeting, and many more.